March 2013

We need a female Dr Who. We also need women writing Dr Who. I was quite shocked to read in an excellent piece by Mathilda Gregory that the last episode of Dr Who written by a woman was in 2008. Said Gregory:

[S]eason seven of Doctor Who will feature no female scribes at all. Not in the bombastic dinosaurs and cowboys episodes that aired last year, and not in any of the new episodes we’re about to receive. In fact, Doctor Who hasn’t aired an episode written by a woman since 2008, 60 episodes ago. There hasn’t been a single female-penned episode in the Moffat era, and in all the time since the show was rebooted in 2005 only one, Helen Raynor, has ever written for the show.

In my opinion, it shows. Whilst some episodes Dr Who are amazing examples of storytelling, some are really quite dreadful, bad ideas that are emotionally flat with little complexity or depth. I think this comes, at least in part, from a lack of diversity on the writing team. Homogenous groups only too easy go along with each other’s ideas, even bad ones, because they lack dissenting voices. The best way to diversify your ideas is to diversify the group of people having them. Which doesn’t just mean having women in your writing team, of course, but looking at all other areas of diversity.

But whilst having some female writers on the Dr Who team would be a great step forward, an even bigger, better step forward would be to make Dr Who a woman. Not just for a novelty episode, but for several series, just like any other Dr Who actor.

With Ada Lovelace Day, we focus on the importance of role models to women and girls, and work towards raising the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (and other related fields). We do this because women’s achievements and contributions often go unrecognised, and the women themselves are often sidelined in favour of their male colleagues. By pointing out women’s achievements, we hope to slowly build new role models from whom girls and women can draw inspiration.

One area that’s just as important but less easy to address is the role of women in fiction. As a teen, I was absolutely entranced by the novels of Anne McCaffrey not least because the vast majority of them featured strong female leads. These fictional women were people I could relate to, that I wanted to be. It’s much, much easier to be inspired by someone of your own gender, because you can more easily imagine yourself as them. And research has shown that female role models are important to women, more so than male role models are to men.

Dr Who is one of the most important science fiction shows on TV in the UK, and yet the lead role is always a male. Females are always companions or tertiary characters there to advance the story. Whilst many of the Drs companions are very strong, intelligent women, they are still secondary characters. The message they give girls and women is that it doesn’t matter how smart, strong, or independent you are, there’ll always be a man in charge.

It’s about time that the Dr Who team took the bull by the horns and cast a woman as Dr Who. Preferably a woman who’s got the experience to show the Doctor as the complex emotional creature we know her to be. And preferably this female doctor would be written by a team that includes a couple of women as permanent members, rather than having the occasionally female-penned script thrown in every now and again.

Having a female Dr Who, well co-written with female scriptwriters, would be utterly fantastic. It would provide a strong female role model for girls, it would provide a great opportunity to explore some complex themes around identity – something that Dr Who has done so well in the past – and it would be a great watch for us women who are so fed up of seeing a male world reflected to us as if we don’t exist.

So come on, BBC, get your act together. More female writers and a female lead is exactly what the Doctor ordered.

How can we have publishers working with start-ups? How are publishers using new technologies. Asked 174 publishers and start-ups and asked what were the relationships with them?

Tech is changing the publishing world. First transformation has been content driven. Next stage is driven by devices, not devices, but services.

Moving to service driven industry – services mean different things. Tech companies help define those services, they think in a different way to publsihers.

What are the difference between publishers and tech companies? They have different legacy, different managerial structure, different way of doing business.

Hard to find publishers that are already working in this collaborative way.

When publishers meet with start-up, they have a different objective than the start-up. Publisher wants to know what’s going on, what are the trends. Start-ups want to close a deal. Few follow-ups because different goals.

Start-ups are desperate for feedback. Is their tech, their idea, validated? Any feedback, if it needs extra features, those comments are strongly appreciated by start-up community.

Appoint someone in the oragnisation who’s responsible for meeting regularly with these people, so they have someone they can have that conversation. And that person should be responsible for going to conferences and finding new trends. Internet has no frontiers, so have to look globally for technology.

Try to engage. Not about investing, but can do many things with these companies. All about data, engagement, direct sales. Whatever problem you want to solve, there’s probably a start-up out there doing it. Start-ups believe publishers can give them value.

Publishers – 83% said they were willing to invest but felt there wasn’t anything out there. But there is a lot out there. Start investigating.

Other sectors, big companies invest in start-ups because they are going to investigate opportunities.

Few publishers investing in the start-up community.

Have to jointly transform ideas into products and services.

Anna Lewis, ValoBox

Make web-friendly books. Take ebooks and deliver them through the browser. Interested in a particular question: How do you sell books to people who aren’t looking for them.

By making books a part of the web, have opportunities open. Each page on ValoBox has a unique URL and can be linked to from anywhere. Can preview any page. Can share and are rewarded for that.

Start-ups are good for doing something by what big companies can’t. Very hard for small company to deal with larger companies. How do you make the relationship work.

Advice for publishers who might want to work with start-ups:

Laying the groundwork – make sure that you as a business are ready to work with start-ups. Be in a place where you’re looking to work with start-ups.

Tell me how you want me to work with you. Job titles mean nothing. Tell them who to go to, who to pitch to. Give the start-up an idea of the kind of process that they can expect to experience. Have some indication of how the process might look like, what are the stages.

Have well-managed files and metadata. So much easier when the building blocks are solid. Stops so much back and forth between you and the start-up. O’Reilly are brilliant at this, and that’s one reason they do work with start-ups, it’s all very straightforward.

Ask stupid questions. If you don’t understand when a start-up is blathering on, then do ask them. If they can explain it to you, then they understand it. If they can’t then maybe you should be questioning whether you want to do business to them. And if you like the project and need to sell it to your boss, you need to do it well.

Getting the most out of the relationship:

Keep it lean. Once had a bit project but it just kept getting bigger and bigger, and then it just got out of control and was shut down. If had started small could have seen what was working and deveop that. Do a small, meaningful trial then expand.

Take advantage of a start-up’s skill and flexibility. Tell them what your problems are, what questions you have. Start-ups are flexible, can adapt. Is there a product tweak that will help solve your problem?

Innovate in small steps.

“If you want to make enemies, try to change something.” Woodrow Wilson.

Start-ups have to make the new sound boring and un-innovative. It’s much easier to meet in the middle.

When it’s not meant to be. Say no if you’re not ready. Would rather be told up front.

Don’t be afraid to try. Sometimes it won’t work out and that’s fine.

“Failure is simply the opportunity to being again, this time more intelligently” – Henry Ford.

Molly Barton, Penguin Books

Investors are reticent to invest in start-ups that involve publishing at all because they see publishers as too slow.

Typical hurdles for publishers.

Structural: Who should the start-up talk to. Is it distribution? Product? Business development? Depending on the answer to that is who gets to talk to that contact. Need to find the right people to consider the idea.

Sales people focused on making their numbers, but need to set targets through new channels, including unknown channels. Asserting that structural forecasting can be really helpful to encourage people to take these opportunities seriously.

Contractual: How does the idea affect existing contracts.

Cultural: There’s discomfort with how people use some language, so be careful.

Hurdles for start-ups.

Lack of industry knowledge: A few people in NY who act as a concierge, work with them for 3/4 months at a time, coach them in language, connect them with the right publishing houses. Can be a productive way of moving forward. They are almost literary agents for products.

Taking models from other media sectors, eg TV or movies or music, without thinking of what makes books different.

Competition: Been pitched ‘Netflix for books’ by more than 20 companies. Lots of people working on similar ideas. Productive way forward is for those companies to talk to each other, be aware of the value proposition others have. Either collaborate or be clear on what makes you different. Know your competitors.

Pivoting too fast or too slow. May start with one idea which takes you somewhere else. That’s normal, but be careful how you communicate that to partner companies.

Goals not aligned with the publisher: A lot of start-ups coming up with a particular idea and their goal is to be acquired. For a publisher, that’s anxiety-producing because who’s going to buy that platform? Amazon? Google? Be straightforward as possible.

Examples of Penguin’s efforts to collaborate with start0ups and funding innovation.

Penguin/Pearson team choosing ten business problems and inviting start-ups to embed themselves into the business to help look at solutions, and sending execs out to embed in start-ups.

Inkling is an start-up, exposing the guts of a book to search, very media rich ebook experience. Now partnering with Penguin.

Citia, addressing an interesting problem, bit ahead of the curve, most people know that fiction sells better than non-fiction. Why is that? Why aren’t they picking up ebooks? Lots of information available on the web. But also, we’re changing the way we consume information.

Kevin Kelly, ed of Wired, take a book that he wrote about ‘what tech wants’, Citia took that, stripped away most of the content, and present it. “Table of contents on steroids”. It’s cards. Faster way of reading non-fiction. How can we make reading non-fic faster but not stupider.

Small Demons, trying to enrich metadata around books, connect books more effectively with pop culture.

Book Country, start-up within a corporation, within Pearson. Wanted to start a community where people could improve their books and go on to self-publish if they wanted. the goal in doing that was really to create a brand that wasn’t a penguin brand where could experiment, learn what it’s like to really create a community, that was a new experience for Penguin, and learn what’s it’s like to run a direct to consumer business.

Would recommend that you set aside money for R&D and experiments. Don’t put those experiments into business as usual analysis for 18-24 months. Allow things to be confidential if they need to, don’t make people defend their ideas every day.

Create targets for trying things you’ve not done before. Share what’s working and what’s not working. Come to conferences like this!

If the printed book is not going to die or be replaced by the ebook, what can we expect from the future?

Assumptions:

– Commerce moves towards an on-demand economy. People will have more influence on the things they consume.

– Physical objects will increasingly become integrated parts of the digital world.

Digital printing made print-on-demand possible, so can print shorter runs, and ‘demand’ is the publisher’s assumption of the demand from the market.

Publishers still has to make an informed guess about the demand, but talking in 100s instead of 1000s, so doesn’t change much of how the business works.

Is now possible to print one book at a time, which is real print-on-demand, where the demand is the demand of the reader.

Best vantage point to talk about on-demand economy is is the point of purchase, where the decision is made by the end consumer to buy something.

For mass production, point of purchase is the end of a long chain of production, logistics, distribution etc. Business opportunity is upstream of the point of purchase.

On-demand economy turns it upside down, the purchase is the beginning of the process, nothing is produced until it is bought. Business is located downstream.

Don’t produce anything until it’s sold. Can understand where is the end consumer? That guides production, where the book should be printed. Order goes to printing press closest to consumer.

Consumer can also decide how the book will be produce: Is it paperback, hard cover, should it have a dust jacket. What was a publishing decision becomes a consumer decision. May be ways to customise the product.

What is going to be produced? A book is traditionally looked upon as copyright protected material, as artwork, as a set form that can’t be changed.

But what way can we change the content in a way that everyone is comfortable with.

Every book will be unique, no one will an exact copy of others.

Part of a larger trend, we have a consumer society, able to surround ourselves with things that are the products of our own wishes, influenced by how we want things to be. A situation that’s more like a pre-industrial society than the current period of industrial society where everthing is mass produced, clones of each other.

Changes how people look at things. Will expect things to bear the marks of our own personalities.

Have to make a shift, new business model. But tough to shift to the future, as business based on one model and changing can hurt.

Going from long runs, inventory, stock, waste and long tail, to short run production, on-demand production, cost optimisation.

Changes in job run length – long runs decreasing, short run lengths and one-offs gaining influence, down to 1 item.

Mass produced static content is under pressure.

If something can be digital, it will become digital.

But have intermediate period, and have to find a way to run a business during it.

Production environment based on steady content and long runs results in massive cost explosion.

Digital print also changed, moved from short run to on-demand.

High efficiency needed for small orders. Need to automate and process jobs, and need no warehousing for on-demand. But need to make sure that have the resources in place, eg enough paper.

Joakim Formo, Ericsson

Belongs to small group of researchers in Ericsson, try to make the abstract visions of future technology into more concrete examples or product designs.

Was going to talk about the Internet of Things, about connecting things to the internet and then perhaps remotely controlling them. Used as a bucket term for everything related to the mix of physical objects, digital collection, networks, clouds, big data. It’s a soup, but it is happening.

Graph of usage of networks is showing typical hockey stick shape. Number of people using internet-connected things is increasing eg cars, electricity meters.

But Internet of Things is also about the things, not just the internet.

Shows demo of a book that when you turn the pages also turns the pages of an electronic version. Object is related explicitly to something else.

Looked a few years ago at how to enhance video with metadata. Tagged a movie catalogue with location data for the scenes in those movies. Use the data as a hub for other interactions with the movie. Can use that data to connect to other movies, eg with scenes filmed in same location. Use the data to go from movie to movie.

Another project, Social Web of Things, trying to make the networked-ness of things more visible. Not a one-to-one connection between things, but full many-to-many connectivity. So created a Facebook for things. So these are connected things and their data is shared. Things connecting horizontally.

Berg and Google Creative Labs, Smart LIghts, augmented reality and connected data. Made a projector wit eyes that could identify things and then project stuff on to them. Enhance the real world, rather than having an introverted world for one person. Can be used on dumb things, not just internet connected smart things. This has been done, so will become cheaper as it is done more.

Flipboard prototype for machine narratives. Robot-jouralism on data from things. Take date from things, ingest into an algorithmic journalist bot, which has read a lot of newspapers and found a way to replicate the pattern or templates in those, so can generate readable text in article format directly from data from things.

Can take that one step further by ingesting that output text into a web animated avatar services with text-to-speech and lipsync, then ingested that into a news studio template, to do a news report of your things.

What is possible today with these technological environments?

Moving towards things having apps, but won’t stop there will explode sideways and connect with others. So will become, metaphorically, socially connected. World of fuzzy objects, composites with physical materials and internet services.

Expectations will change. Products will increasingly be expected to have interrelations with other ecosystems.

So what is a book? What is an artefact in this future?

Will need some new competencies. How to product and compose physical-digital ecosystems.

Discoverability: how do we find books and how do we find readers? Over last ten years, number of books in bookstores has decreased, see less books and more other stuff like cards and toys.

Death or the physical bookstore that has happened in UK and US is not yet here, in Sweden bookstores have grown since 2005. Per capita, Sweden has more bookstores than US/UK. But, in small decrease, 3% have closed in last few years.

In 2011, 75% of bookstores decreased turnover. More stores will likely have to close.

Don’t buy as many books in bookstores as we used to. Apart from that being a problem with revenue. There is another issue to face: Where do people find their books.

Article in Swedish Bookseller about struggling literary reviews. Reviewers are paid less, fewer books are being reviews, newspapers facing huge losses in readers, so reviews not necessarily a good way to reach readers, esp young ones.

Internet can be useful, all familiar with concepts of ‘also bought’ algorithm. Easy to search for a book that’s been recommended. But what we lose with the internet is serendipity. Hard to find things we don’t now we want or have never heard about, or outside our comfort zone. That is something that online bookstores have to figure out. Because it’s not really about randomness, it’s about being told about something you would never think of, or that people who have the same taste as you would never think of.

Bookish is trying to work around that with its recommendations from staff, and make recommendations from a more complex algorithm than other systems. But that’s hard, because when you come to computers someone has to do the coding and you lose a bit of ‘human error’, and that error is vital to finding new reading, or new readers.

Need to understand readers. Eg. Where are they? What else to they buy? What do they read? Why do they read? What do they eat? What music do they listen to?

Finding this out is easier on the internet.

“If you like this book, you will most certainly not like this book.” Good to recommend the unthinkable.

Nick Sidwell, Guardian

Guardian Books is a very small publisher, trying to do something that is different, have access to the wider environment of the Guardian newspaper.

Have access to a vast range of different writers, and to an enormous audience. 30m monthly unique browsers, 215k print circ, global audience, millions of followers on social media, 10,000 of bookshop customer.

Useful to tap into this audience, but these figures are the equivalent of sales figure in that they are straightforward measurements of a single factor, but what’s more important is the data behind these figures.

Based on what was popular amongst the paper’s reader, decided to publish a book called Swim, which is about swimming in wild places.

Now trying to construct more of a story from the data.

Guardian Shorts, ebook only short-form non-fiction or long-form journalism. Same thing. No longer just taking popularity factors, but also asking questions of that data and understandings of the audience. So understand how they engage with content, how they behave on the website. Team of data analysts take from that deeper, richer more targeted and more focused understandigs of what it is that people want. Then apply that to editorial decision making.

Three questions to ask ourselves:

1. Which subject areas should we focus on?

2. What should that content be?

3. How big is the potential audience, who are they and where can we reach them?

Have a lot of data about who these people are, where they are, what devices they have. Can answer some of the questions Tove mentioned in the intro.

Most popular areas on news website: news, sport, culture, travel, tech. So develop shorts in those areas.

Now have nearly 60 titles. Take a lot of archival content from both the Guardian and Observer, and with editorial work can curate that into short packaged ebooks.

Now trying to move beyond curating archive content, into commission new stories, not just a title or subject, but to use that extra data for how we structure of the book itself.

Facts are Sacred is about data journalism. Used how people were engaging with the Guardian data blog, knew there was a very engaged audience and looked at what they were interested in, and looked at what was keeping them coming back, what was important. Decided on eight chapters to understand what was done, whether they could do it themselves, to how it changes the role of journalism.

Simon Rogers, editor of data blog, wrote the book. Were able to use understanding of the engagement that people were showing to predict what their possible sales were. Knew that 10% of 1mn audience were engaged, knew how any had ereaders, how mmany in UK or US, and how many read short-form non-fiection — 4,844. Also knew from archive content, and knew 50% of sales came from non-core Guardian readers, so realistic figure for sales target is 9,699. Have sold 7,000 copies so far, but that ebook is no longer available as redeveloping it.

Felt happy with that, was a very useful proof of what we were trying demonstrate. Could take this deeper analysis of how people respond to the newspaper to inform decision making for book content.

New editions published next month, moving to a printed book an a rich ebook developed for the iPad, which is better for the type of content, including videos and interactive elements.

Been using marketing data to try and match where we’ve got to with our editorial decision, and then to make sure that we bring it to the right people, commercial profiling of customers, so can match up characteristics of book buyers who have shown engagement with similar products.

What lies at the heart of this is the editor. It’s still the editor that makes the decisions, the data without someone to make use of it is just a big spreadsheet of numbers. Even when the different metrics are put together to generate insight, unless we know what to do with it, ask it specific questions, have a goal, it remains a spreadsheet full of numbers. Editor remains central.

Still need all traditional editorial talent. Don’t let the data dictate what we’re doing, use it to inform decision making and understanding. It’s a tool much as an editor will take on all sorts of information about a market, the data about our reades is just another tool. Allows us to make wiser, more informed decisions.

Been doing this a year and a half. At the beginning of this year we made a switch, moving away from the archive material, commissioning more new titles. All of those titles have come from an understanding of our audience.

Great opportunity to gather more data. Want to not just use data to commission, but also to develop how we distribute. If you understand how people read your books, that’s possible digitally, not always easy to get hold of, but if you have channels that feed back to you, it can be enormously valuable.

– be data first

– data is a tool editors shouldn’t be without

– data needs organising and interpreting

– use data to prove your assumptions

– …but also allow it to change your mind.

Andrew Rhomberg, JellyBooks

Industry gorilla – Amazon. How do we not get squashed? Where is that gorilla weak? Discovery. Amazon is where you go to buy book, few peopel discover new books on Amazon. Amazon doesn’t share data. If we have a data-focused approach, can we use that data and collaborate around it? Can we be DRM free? Can we share book samples?

Discovery is not one thing. Five forms of discovery:

– Serendipitous

– Social

– Distributed

– Data-driven

– Incentivised

Jellybooks.com had just covers, no price, no text, because it’s easier to browse pictures.

Want to make books more viral and engaging, so create a ‘twitter card’ which is easy to share.

Widgets for book sampkes so authors, agents, publishers and reviwers can embed them on homepage blog or website. Samples which are easy to include, and people can download a sample later for reading.

Oldest data-driven discovery is the best-seller list. Can have a data-driven approach that’s unique to each person, not just mass popularity. In a wider concept, think of book as the paper book, butthinkn of the ebook as a file, a container. Couldthink of a book as a URL, maybe to the produce page, Goodreads review, quote that has been pulled out on readmill, these links are shared over the internet – blogs, Pinterest, emails. These links are accessible, can’t see amazon sales data but can see how People share link to Amazon product pages.

Who’s sharing? Who’s acting on that sharing? Use a book link as a reference, and because have index the links, can track them.

Data is very messy, so track it, clean it up, and put it out as an open API, so that others out there can use that data and create fabulous new ways of discovery. People can do data visualisation, data mining, and others benefit from their work.

Jellybooks data: want to know what people are reading, without asking them or them telling us. If you ask someone what they are reading they will not tell you the truth. Books on the shelves are what they want you to believe they are reading.

So through the links on sharing and consumption can get an idea of what they are really doing.

If we want to influence a reader, can you influence the people who influence them rather than spam them?

Any publisher can participate, and then they start tracking the books. Discovery only of interest when it’s their books being discovered.

Incentivised discovery – you get a special discount but only if you can get enough people to join in. Group deal. So get an email, download the sample over breakfast, first 10% of book, share it with others, and if you like the deal you sign up with your credit card. But you need to share it, and get others to buy it as well.Can monitor how you are progressing, don’t tell you what the minimum is (set by publisher) the deal is activated and you get the book discounted by 50%.

Deadline is 6pm, so there’s only 12 hours to do it. Most people in London commute home at about 6pm, so they can then get the whole book to read on homewards commute. Change those times in different countries, eg. Spain is 9am – 9pm.

Not about trying to kill Amazon, but about an alternate strategy.

Soon launching in Spain, US, Latin America.

May be targeting a smaller market than amazon, but because it’s such a big world, can make this niche big enough to be viable.

I’m at the IfBookThen conference in Stockholm today. Later on I’ll be talking about direct sales, but in the meantime I’m looking forward to some really interesting sessions which I will, of course, blog here in as much detail as I can capture. As usual, I’m live-blogging, so expect errors!

Joanna Ellis, The Literary Platform

Stories sit at the heart of publishing, without them we don’t have a business, and storytelling is shaped by the technology at hand. Shames the relationship between author and reader.

Digital technologies shape the network, which shames the story. Rich opportunity to evolve.

A few key themes emerging: how the audience is becoming participatory; how the creative impetus of digital tech is bleeding back into physical and shaping the print world.

Inanimate alice

Episodic novel for teens, readers drive the story forward by performing various actions. Students & young people encouraged to hack the story themselves, so readers can add their own media. Was conceived as enterntainment, but now adopted by teachers in 70 countries as a way of developing digital literacy. Shift away from the auteur to collaboration, created by team of 8-9 people and the audience.

The Silent History

Dystopian future story. More adult than Alice, but also episodic, short episodes delivered as you read, written by team of 5 people. Using GPS, stories are located in the physical world that you have to go to. Can contribute in term from that place back into the story.

Dreams of Your Life

Interactive story, written by AL Kennedy. Quite dark, written to go with a documentary about a woman who died and wasn’t found for three years. As a reader you respond to questions and the responses shape the story. Unfolds over one half hour. Responses are pre-designed but still feel tailored to each reader.

Composition No. 1

Another in which the reader shapes the story. Box contains 1000 pages, each page has a self-contained narrative, and the reader chooses which order to read them in. But readers were unwilling to shuffle the pages, they felt it “breaks the rules”. But in iPad version the pages shuffle automatically and only stops when your finger is on the screen. Technology liberates us from rules and conventions we’re used to.

Enchanted Books

Not released yet, part of Library of Lost Books. using physical computing tech to bring life to an old print book. Sensors are hidden in the spine, and send data back about whether the reader is turning pages, and triggers the sending of audio back to the reader’s iPhone.

What we see more and more, there has been one way of being for so long. Vanilla ebooks are an extension of the print book world these projects are more individual.

Heard from authors that they felt excluded from the process of discussing the future of publishing, so set up The Writing Platform. Are trying to pair writers with technologists, got two writers, two technologists for three months to experiment and see what happens.

Evan Ratliff, Atavist

About two and a half years ago, was working as a freelance journalist for a magazine, and was complaining to editor about how they couldn’t do stories of the length they wanted to do. And sometimes, when print stories moved to the web, it was just thrown up and didn’t take advantage of what you could do with the web.

So came up with the idea of a digital publication something in between magazines and books. So built a platform. Asked journalists to pitch a story to them, but people were not interested in writing for something that didn’t exist.

So Ratliff heard about a robbery in Stockholm, so came here and researched it, and wrote the first Atavist story, Lifted. Story opens with the actual footage of the robbery, landed a helicopter on the roof of a cash depot and robbed it.

Wanted to tell the story but happy to mix media. Decided that footage was a better lead than anything they could write. Chapter one is about the planning of the robbery.

If you don’t know where the locations are, you can call a map up, you can see the view from the bench that the robbers sat on when they planned it, photos of the people involved you can bring up by tapping on their name.

Evolved over last two years to be a story telling company. Make short books. Set out to tell true stories, what you call that – book, magazine – doesn’t matter.

Recent one was primarily a documentary film with text built in.

Created tools to allow them to write stories, but provide those tools to publishers and soon to individuals.

Stories are sold individually or by subscription. Can download to ereader, or read online, or through an app on your phone. The story is the key thing, where it gets told is just a matter of technology. Multimedia designed into everything.

Country Club in Baghdad – first chapter is an animated narration of how the story starts.

Try to do stories once a year about music, as this model is perfect. Piano Demon is a story about a musician from the 20s/30s, with original recordings of his music. The idea is to give the reader an experience that feels different. Feels like reading but has a cinematic quality. But it’s not the same for every story, but every story has something. Try to keep it different.

Had to find an audience, and some people read on ebook readers, so that strips out media, but need a broader audience.

Software: helping others tell their stories. Platform: Creativist. Eliminates the need to create tech middlemen to converts files. Tech allows you to do everything in one place.

User agnostic: needs to be usable by the storytellers, not coders.

Media agnostic: doesn’t care if a chapter is video or audio or text.

Platform agnostic: doesn’t care where you want to send it, so can do video heavy version or it can strip out the video and make it text-only.

Going to be doing full-length books, fiction and non-fiction, taking these principles to apply it to print and see what goes.

Opening up Creativist to individuals too.

Frank Rose, author

Talking about the idea of story worlds, re-imagining it and making room for the reader or viewer to explore it.

Looked at the Steig Larsson’s character Mikael Blomkvist, how would he have reported a story? Did the research and produced the piece.

Expanding the story of the film. Part of a project doing with Fincher to explain his take on Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Puzzles, treasure hunt.

Immersive. Immersion not a new idea – Don Quixote lost his mind due to reading too much.

Dickens, participatory story telling. Era of migration from countryside to city, at a time of social upheaval. Cities good for publishing – literacy rates soared, 30% to 67% in ten years 1830 – 1840. But no one had money, but had better printing presses, paper was better quality and there were railways to distribute stuff. So publishers decided to print novels cheaply and sell in instalments, a few chapters a month at an affordable price. Almost all of Dickens’ novels were serialised. He knew his audience very well having lived it.

What Would Google Do? People should turn for guidance to Google.

Perhaps ask, What would Dickens do? Industrial revolution created mass media, generated new industries like newspapers and magazines, and book publishing. But didn’t allow audience to connect with author.

Dickens’ serialisation did allow connection. He was writing chapters at a time. He worked at a magazine called Master Humphrey’s Clock which was weekly. Wanted to shorten the “intervals of communication” between him and his readers.

People over time forgot what Dickens did, and how he was in constant contact with his readers. They wanted some sort of voice in his stories, though he didn’t always listen. There was pandemonium when it became clear that Little Nell wasn’t going to make it in the Old Curiosity Shop. Ship coming into NY harbour greeted by a crowd of poeple shouting “Is Little Nell alive?”

If a story wasn’t going well, eg Martin Chuzzlewit, he listened more to his reader, so moved the action to America.

What would Dickens Do? He would have had a blog. His web skills would have been good, but he would have faced issues. And challenges of daily publication would have been worse than weekly publication. Might have done like John Lanchester, wrote Capital, about the residence of Pepys Road.

Matt Locke worked with Faber & Faber to create online version of Lanchester’s fictional world.

Personalise the story through a game. Get a series of emails, including news stories tailored to your circumstances, would learn how you’d be effected by the next ten years, the ‘lost ten years’ predicted by economists due to austerity.

Another example, The Strain Trilogy, website that takes the story further. What would life really be like if you lived in a world where vampire were in charge and humans were just food.

Pottermore. Would Dickens have done Olivermore? Oliver Twist the serial was different to the novel.

Readers have been trained to think of a book as a book, but now starting to see books in a different way. Want books to embrace them and draw them in. New relationship with readers.

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Queen of the May

Every year, on May Day, a young woman is stolen away by the faeries to become their Queen for a year. This year, though, the faeries have bitten off more than they can chew. Shakti Nayar will do whatever it takes to get her own life as a botanist back. As she struggles to work out how to get home, she uncovers Faerie’s dark secret and finds that she is not the only human who needs saving.

The Lacemaker

All the threads looked the same to the innocent eye, but Maude could see the black heart running up through one strand as it wove its way through the lace roundel. She busied herself with tidying her bobbins as a customer browsed the lace mats on her stall.

“I’ll take this one,” the woman said, holding up a square piece, twelve inches across. Maude winced, picked up the piece she had just completed and held it out to the woman for her consideration.

Argleton

Matt is fascinated by the story of Argleton, the unreal town that appeared on GeoMaps but which doesn’t actually exist. When he and his friend and flatmate Charlie are standing at the exact longitude and latitude that defines Argleton, Matt sets in motion a chain of events that will take him places he didn’t know existed… and which perhaps don’t.

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A Passion for Science

From the identification of the Horsehead Nebula to the creation of the computer program, from the development of in vitro fertilisation to the detection of pulsars, A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention brings together inspiring stories of how we achieved some of the most important breakthroughs in science and technology.